For years, I’ve been hearing that Texas is going to turn into a “purple” swing state in the next decades. And my response has always been the same: that’s nonsense. I’m not saying that it is untrue. I’m just saying that there is no way to know. The brilliance of the Republican Party is how it is able to sculpt a world of the deserving and the undeserving. The fact that African Americans are not part of the Republican coalition is not directly because of their skin color. If the Republicans could win by glorifying African Americans and dumping on the white middle class, they would — just as long as they were still able to do their real business of taking from the poor and giving to the rich.

But last week, I saw this paper, Projecting Partisan Change Deep in the Heart of Texas, by Tiffany Cartwright and Tyler Young, two political scientists at Collin College. They looked at the changes of demographics over the next 35 years. Not surprisingly, they find that if voting patterns stay the same, by 2050, Texas will be a solidly blue state. Of course, voting patterns do not stay the same. But what shocked me was not how things would look in 2050, when we really can’t say what will be going on. The shocking finding is that by 2020 — just five years from now — Democrats will have a solid (six percentage point) advantage in Texas.

Note how stark this is. The last time Texas voted for a Democratic presidential candidate was 1976. Also, “Texas Democrats have not won a statewide election in over twenty years.” There is a reason that the people supporting Texas politicians running for president are so certain that Obama is in the process of “taking over” Texas with this Jade Helm nonsense: Texas isn’t just red — it is crazy red. So if Texas became at all competitive in the next few years, it would be amazing. It would also make things really hard for the Republican Party.

Of course, Texas is not going to vote Democratic in the 2020 presidential election. It almost certainly would if everyone eligible to vote actually voted. But we know that is not going to happen. And in the case of Texas, the problem is extreme. The demographic shift in Texas is largely due to increasing Latino population. And they are terrible voters! “In the last few decades, reported turnout among Hispanic voters is about half that of white or black voters in Texas.” Of course, that might change as Latinos respond to their greater political power. Sad to say, people are more likely to vote if they think they will win. The problem is that it will take time to get Latinos to take voting more seriously. And during that time, the Republicans will be working to re-brand the “right” kind of people and the “wrong” kind of people.

Nevertheless, I find this all interesting. Even as early as 2020, the Republicans are going to at least have to start protecting Texas as their territory. And that’s a good start. There doesn’t seem to be any move at all among Republicans to reach out to Latino voters. As Republican voters get whiter, they seem to demand ever more extreme demonstrations of anger at immigrants. Eventually, the Republicans will get over that. But in the next five years? I don’t think so.

Amy Fried wrote a very good article on something that I’ve been thinking about a lot, Three Stark, Politically Critical Dynastic Differences Between Jeb and Hillary. Let me give you an overview of it, and then I’ll add my own take, because I think there is a much more profound difference than she talks about.

In a sense, all three of Fried’s differences could be summed up thusly, “Hillary is a far better politician than Jeb” — because Americans are particularly reticent to blame a person for the sins of a loved one. But she was right to break this all out. She started with something pretty obvious, “Bill Clinton is seen favorably. George W Bush is seen unfavorably.” It’s true: Americans don’t mind power families if, you know, they like the power family. Bush Sr isn’t terribly revered and Bush Jr is hated. So Jeb Bush gets nothing positive from his association and Hillary Clinton does.

The second difference is really just the first difference, “The Clinton economic record is far better than the Bush economic record.” That’s why people like Clinton. If the economy had boomed under Bush, they would all forgive his many other problems. But it didn’t. As Fried noted, even if you forget the bursting of the housing bubble, the unemployment rate under Bush started at 4.2% and went up to 6.3%. For Clinton, it was the opposite: from 7.3% down to 4.2%. Are these fair ways of judging a president? No! But they are how people do judge presidents. And Bush’s economic policies were bad regardless.

The third difference is the heart of the matter:

Even with George W Bush’s policies being unpopular in pretty much every area, Jeb Bush doesn’t see the need push against them. Hillary Clinton is showing no hesitation is pushing back against Bill Clinton’s unpopular policies. I just wish she would push back against his bad policies that aren’t particularly unpopular, but that is certainly asking too much. My hope is just that if she becomes president, she will try to do some minor fixes to the way that her husband screwed up things like the welfare system.

But I think there is a much more fundamental difference between the Clintons and the Bushes. I don’t even see the Clintons as a dynasty. They are a power couple. They were both involved in politics before they met. So their existence as a couple is largely due to their involvement in politics. It is the other way around for the Bushes. I don’t think that George W Bush would have gone into politics if it hadn’t been the family business. What’s more, I don’t see anyone taking him seriously if he had. He has always been a silly guy. People took him seriously because his father had been president. People take Hillary Clinton very seriously on her own terms.

So there is a Bush dynasty, but it is a Clinton partnership. Does that mean that there are no problems with the partnership? Not at all. And it is getting a lot of scrutiny — and it will get a whole lot more. But the Bush dynasty is a greater concern — especially in a country that so fetishizes meritocracy (even though it doesn’t practical it). But it seems oddly “off limits” in mainstream political discussions. Sure, people talk about it on the margins. But just imagine in Jeb Bush were elected president. That would mean that the last three Republican presidents were all from the same family: a father and his two sons. That’s a dynasty — and more proof than is required to call the lie of American “equality of opportunity.” A husband and a wife being president, separated by almost two decades, it is not a dynasty — although I still don’t especially like it.